‘I ought to kill you,’ said Quinn. ‘I ought to put you out of your misery, like an animal.’
But Thorpe was feeling more confident. He knew Mansell Quinn. And Quinn had never been a clever man, as far as he was concerned.
‘I’m your mate, Mansell,’ he said. ‘Remember?’
‘Crap. You shafted me, like everyone else.’
‘No.’
‘Mate? Some mate.’
For a moment, the fingers had tightened again. But Quinn’s grip had no conviction any more. Thorpe gasped air in and tried to force himself to relax. His hands dropped away from Quinn’s wrists as if he had lost the strength to support his arms. Quinn immediately let him go, and Thorpe fell back, gasping loudly and fingering his throat.
‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ said Quinn. ‘You’re not dead yet.’
‘It’s my chest. It’s a real mess, the doctors said. I don’t suppose I’ll live much longer.’
Quinn leaned closer. ‘If you’re lying to me, Will, you won’t live for another day. I’ll make sure of that.’
‘Yeah, OK, Mansell. OK.’
With a sudden thrust, Quinn grabbed a handful of Thorpe’s jacket and banged his head against the wall.
‘You’d better believe me,’ he said. ‘Because I mean it.’
‘OK, I said I believe you.’
Quinn sat back on his heels, and there was silence. Thorpe could hear the water dripping from Quinn’s waterproof and
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the faint rustling as he moved. He turned his head to the side, hoping to see the other man’s face. But all he could make out was a black shape against the faint rectangle of the doorway.
‘You told Rebecca, didn’t you, Will?’
‘That wasn’t my fault,’ said Thorpe. ‘Look, the police told me she was killed. Did you - ?’
He heard Quinn take a sharp breath, and he stopped. Perhaps he didn’t want to ask that question, after all.
‘You talk too much, Will. That’s a pity,’ said Quinn.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It comes of spending too long on your own, I suppose. You never learned to control your mouth. Remember when you came to visit me at Sudbury, and you talked to me about what it was like back home? You even told me the places you class. That made you much too easy to find, Will.’
Thorpe tried to laugh, but the noise came out as a wheeze, and his mouth filled with bile. He wanted to spit it out, but was afraid that Quinn would take it as a deliberate insult.
The should have known better, shouldn’t I, Mansell? Giving away my position. What an idiot, eh?’
‘You told Rebecca, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who else did you talk to?’
Thorpe didn’t reply. Quinn shifted his position, so that the darkness of his eyes became visible for a moment inside his hood.
‘I’ve got all night, Will. And it could be a long and painful night.’
Drawing a laboured breath, Thorpe raised a hand in an appeasing gesture. ‘There’s no need to be like that, Mansell,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
Ben Cooper swirled his beer, watching the foam rise over the lip of the glass. He was aware of the pub getting busier, more
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and more voices raised in conversation around him as the Eden Valley landscape withdrew into the darkness.
‘So will you help me, Diane?’ he said. ‘I need your emotional detachment.’
‘My what}’
Cooper realized he might not have put that in quite the right way. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said.
Fry sat back and gazed out of the window at the rain falling over the Eden Valley.
‘This would be entirely unofficial, I suppose?’
‘Yes. Officially, I’ve had advice about the potential threat from Quinn, just like the others on the list. But that’s as far as it goes. Officially.’
‘I see. A personal favour, then?’
Cooper nodded. He was starting to feel like a small child in the head teacher’s office, asking for time off school.
‘What do you say, Diane?’
She continued to stare at the view across the valley. She’d learned to control her responses so well that Cooper sometimes wondered whether she’d heard him at all. She had a trick of waiting just the right amount of time, so he had to start working out for himself what she was thinking. Invariably, of course, he was mistaken. And so she
